Summer holidays should be longer

She wasn’t claiming to be a teacher. Not all decisions around schooling should be centred on teacher wants.

It must be lovely living in a the type of naive world where you genuinely think an extra 2 weeks off at summer would improve children’s mental health.

But we are not paid full time! In other jobs, people are paid for the full year. We are only paid for term time plus statutory holiday pay. The other 8 weeks are unpaid.
We do a lot of unpaid overtime as it is during the year. I'm not working extra weeks for free.

Most professional jobs where people are on salaries they work many hours for free, every week, without fail

Well, yes.
Because we would be working more hours...
We are only paid for a certain number of hours in a year. Reduce holidays = increase teaching days = pay us more.

Retired teacher here - 32 years service, the vast majority in state schools. Without a minimum of 6 weeks summer holidays (& it should be 10 in my opinion) I wouldn’t have even considered a career in the state sector but would have honestly into the private sector.

I suspect a fair number of other well qualified teachers who have a choice would also do the same. What effect would that have on standards in state schools?🤔

If teachers were paid for the holidays, schools would be able to instruct to them to attend. But as they aren’t, they don’t.

In no way would schools want to draw attention to the weekend work in term time already done by teachers in case they stopped doing it.

If you had to work extra days at your job, would you expect to be paid more for those extra days or would you do them for free?

In what way does the fact that teachers will need to be paid for working on days which are currently unpaid leave not make sense?

Have you been drinking?

I think it’s more the lack of monitoring of children in the school holidays and lack of free school dinners for children on social services radar.

Add to that the cost of summer clubs £230.00 per week at my local one per child per week, which can be crippling for families with two or more children who are working but just about to make ends meet each month.

Not everyone has family members who can help, for example both of my parents sadly died of cancer, so I don’t have the option of grandparents and no close family.

I have annual leave, but obviously leave has to be shared amongst my team as we all have school age children, and there is work to do so term time only working isn’t an option!

That survey is from four years ago, doesn’t include the hire of air conditioning units or the number of schools that have been retrofitted or rebuilt since then.

Also it’s not raw data, but it states that it has ‘been weighted to reflect teacher and national school demographics’

As I said in my post, you will struggle to find accurate information on this that represents current conditions in schools.

I would also add that during heatwaves the country had to keep working and that there isn’t a maximum working temperature in the workplace!

I work in a building that doesn’t have air conditioning and do a job that requires acute reasoning skills…. are you suggesting that my employer tells me to take the summer off work? I work in the public sector and can only imagine the Daily Mail outrage if public and private sector workers were given paid leave on hot days!

Our climate is changing and we will experience more extreme weather conditions in the future including hotter drier summers, and we will need to adapt our behaviour to cope!

In Europe they start school much earlier to help deal with warmer weather, so perhaps you would support school starting at 7am in the summer term to help children achieve optimal school temperatures?

Err you’re not a maths teacher are you?

Your argument is that teachers aren’t paid for all the holidays. Ie Some of the holidays = unpaid leave.

But would need more pay if holidays were reduced?

Make that make sense.

This OP is a great one for posting ideas about increasing teachers’ pay or improving their working conditions, always with a suggestion that it’s for the good of the children. They then proceed to ignore the reasonable challenges to the (generally stupid) stated position, like the one that someone posted within the first 10 or so replies about how awful the long holidays are for social inequality.

My daughters schools have had air conditioning, one is a 1930s school where it has been retrofitted, and my other daughter attends a new build school with both air conditioning and air flow ventilation.

I think it’s far more common in schools than you would imagine, as when choosing secondary schools we visited 9 in my local area and they all had air conditioning…

I have recently installed a wall mounted air conditioning unit, after having a portable unit for a few years.

New build schools generally have climate change adaptations such as green or biosolar roof systems, strategic shading, and strategic tree planting to create a more thermal stable learning environment.

The DfE have been providing retrofit grants for several years for retrofitting of these features.

I doubt given the fragmentation of school control LPA / Academy run schools you will be able to find accurate data for this, but it seems to be a common feature, especially as schools may hire portable air conditioning units for heatwaves as a cost effective solution if they do not have permanent units.

That probably includes Bank Holidays.

I disagree, none of the classrooms I have taught in have been so hot it was pointless the children being there (and no, none of them have aircon). Additionally, what you are suggesting basically teaches our children that when the weather is warm you shouldn't have to work. Doesn't seem like a very good life lesson to me.

Batshit idea, six weeks is plenty long enough. I'd rather have shorter summer holiday and two week half terms

Completely agree with everything you have written.

My kids love school, their friends that I know love school, and I think our schools and the teachers are brilliant. It’s routine, structure, fun, learning, trying new things, challenges, socialising, sports etc and the list could go on and on. Why is it always holidays must be fun and school must be awful? Mine love both!

We were warned by Chris Whitty that Covid would have an effect for a long time on our young people and schools have been dealing with this over the last few years. I know with certain years in our schools, you could absolutely see the effects of the kids not attending pre-school (I know that from parents and teaching staff).

I always find with these discissions it’s a competition (with some!) to declare they must love their children more by wanting longer holidays. Quite the opposite is true especially now. I can imagine the majority of teachers and parents must agree that the last thing we need when we are getting back on track after Covid is more time out of school.

My school only has air con in the computer rooms to prevent them overheating.

It would have been 2 months at primary so it was probably more manageable. It's the secondary schools who get 3 months , finishing end of May in ROI

vs UK workplaces as a whole to put into context. As no one is saying workplaces without aircon need more than 6 weeks summer holidays!

I think, in a way you’ve hit the nail on the head … it’s different for everyone…A level and prepping students for Oxbrigde is tough and demands a lot of time. Private sector is different to state sector which is different for primary and secondary. Everyone’s experiences are different. However .. anyone who thinks teachers have 6 clear weeks off in the summer is mistaken… certainly for all the jobs I worked in anyway.